Seagate is best known for manufacturing hard disk drives and other storage devices for use in computers, servers, mobile devices, media players, and more—in fact, the company just announced a new self-encrypting drive for enterprise environments and a 1 TB hard drive with a Serial-Attached SCSI (SAS) interface. But the company not only enables consumers and companies to keep their data—it helps them wipe it out, too. Through subsidiary Seagate Recovery Services the company has just announced Seagate Data Erasure, software solutions that are designed to let users and companies wipe their drives clean before they’re replaced, sold, or decommissioned from service.

　　“Our internal studies show that more than 50 percent of drives returned from customer data centers were not properly erased and still contained corporate data,” said Seagate Recovery Services president Jay Remley, in a statement. “With the growing amount of information kept on personal computers, sensitive customer and corporate data must be securely managed from the time it is created until it is destroyed.”

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　　As many computer users know, simply deleting a file from a drive doesn’t actually destroy the data that file contained: it simply marks the space where the file was stored as available for re-use. The increasing capacity of everyday hard drives means it can be weeks or months before those drive sectors are ever re-used, making some or all of a deleted file’s data easily recoverable via “undelete” programs that simply scan for available blocks that contain information. For the truly paranoid, even re-initializing a drive and overwriting the empty areas isn’t enough, since computer forensic experts can sometimes retrieve data even from areas that have been overwritten.

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　　Seagate Data Erasure products are intended to let businesses, organizations, and even end users let go of their old hard drives without letting go of their data: the products offer 13 secure erasure methodologies including methods certified by the NSA, and Department of Defense, NATO, and the NCSC. Seagate Data Erasure is available in a USB edition—users can just pop it into a PC to access and eras a disk drive—along with a Network Edition for IT departments, and a Disk Recycler edition for processing large numbers of disks via a network. And, even better, Seagate Data Erasure will provide a “Certificate of Erasure” so organizations can have assurance and confidence the drives have been thoroughly wiped…and maybe have a piece of paper to wave around in court if their data is suddenly found running loose on the Internet.

　　Seagate Recovery Services hasn’t offered any pricing for the system; instead, interested customers are encouraged to call for a quote.